Colleges: De-Escalation on the Campus

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It is one of the many paradoxes of the Viet Nam war that while the demand for military officers is growing, one source of supply is dwindling steadily. Apart from the Federal Government's four service academies, there are seven four-year military colleges in the U.S., and they are surviving mainly by sharply de-escalating their military elements. They are, in fact, becoming more like civilian campuses every day—even to a few antiwar protesters and law-defying pot smokers.

The war itself is unpopular, and most students would rather gamble on the uncertainties of the draft than join cadet programs, which include at least two years' active duty as a military officer. Besides, the current college generation takes an anti-Establishment view that scoffs at polished buttons and stiff-necked discipline. A military regimen has become an unappealing burden to add to academic chores.

Coeds & Cadets. Outside of the service academies at West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs and New London, only three colleges remain as all-male institutions in which every student must be a cadet: The Citadel, Virginia Military Institute and Vermont's Norwich University. Three others (Texas A. & M., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Pennsylvania's PMC Colleges) have made the cadet corps optional for men. To the dismay of combat-toughened alumni, they have also admitted coeds to all civilian courses. The seventh school, North Georgia College, has always enrolled women. The combined cadet enrollment at the seven has suffered a decline, including a drop of nearly 50% at V.P.I, since 1960.

The troubles of the military college are best illustrated by PMC Colleges in Chester, Pa. Started as a boys' school in 1821 and known as Pennsylvania Military College for 73 years, the school was skidding toward bankruptcy before it opened a coed night division in 1954, accepted full-time nonmilitary students in 1958, finally added an all-civilian branch, called Penn Morton College, in 1966. The trustees fought for two years over what to name the combination, finally agreed on PMC to please those alumni who wanted some suggestion of a military designation. Although cadet applications have been dropping for four years and some 100 beds in cadet dorms are now vacant, total enrollment has climbed to 1,500 (it was as low as 650 in 1956).

Potted to Pot. The PMC cadets still rise to reveille at 0700, freeze to attention any time an upperclassman barges into their room. They live in fear of humorless student commanders, who rule their daily lives. This month two cadets were expelled and one suspended when the cadet brigade commander learned that they had returned to campus after a drinking spree and sprayed each other with a fire extinguisher—a prank that would have drawn little more than tolerant laughs at most other schools. Even so, PMC has turned soft, complains Senior Cadet James W. McConnell, president of the student council. "When we came here as freshmen it was much better—all military," he says.